November 26, 2008

Celebrating Christ with a Jesse Tree

Making a Jesse Tree as a family during the Advent season over the last three years really helped our family to focus on Jesus during the holidays. In fact, the first year we did a Jesse tree was the first year that we had a fairly relaxed holiday season, and that was with four children, ages 6, 8, 10 and 11. I think that purposefully taking the focus off ourselves and our own little family had a lot to do with that.

Last year we discovered the inductive method Advent study that I posted about and attempted to do that and the Jesse tree. That was a bit too much. We managed to do the Jesse tree and our usual Advent readings, but we didn't do much with the study.

We sat down as a family a few weeks ago to plan out the holidays a bit, and the kids asked if we could skip the Jesse tree this year and do the Advent study instead. We'll miss it, but we agreed. New traditions are good too!

If you are interested in learning about the Jesse tree and possibly using one this season, it starts this Friday, November 28. The links from my past Jesse tree posts are still active and updated for this year, so I will re-post those.

This site has simple printable ornaments in two sizes and Jesse Tree readings here. I printed the ornaments out on card stock and had my daughters cut them out, hole-punch them, and tie ribbon around each one. I already had a miniature Christmas tree, so I decided to use that rather than make one. The "Advent Reflections" document (updated each year) includes a short Scripture reading, a synopsis of the actual Bible story mentioned, and the Bible verses to read the whole story. When we are busy, we just do the short reading and synopsis. When we have more time, we read the entire story from the Bible.